Archive for January, 2011

It’s time for another Imprudence/Kokua status update. This update is brought to you by the letter “i” and the color purple.

If you’re a Second Life user, you may have heard that Linden Lab recently raised the group limit from 25 to 42. We’ve received some questions about whether current versions of Imprudence support the new limit. The answer is: partly. You can join up to 42 groups, by opening the group info window and clicking Join (if they are open enrollment). However, being invited to a group will not work if you are already in 25 or more groups. Also, the Groups window will say “You belong to __ groups (of 25 maximum)”. The “25 maximum” part is incorrect, and you can just ignore it.

We’re preparing a new “patch release” of the 1.3-series viewer, version 1.3.1. Imprudence 1.3.1 fixes the group limit, as well as a few other nasty bugs, like being unable to interact with the world after taking a freeze-frame snapshot. It also includes the font customization features from the Experimentals, and a few tweaks to bring the viewer into compliance with the latest SL policy revisions. It will most likely be available sometime in the next week.

Progress on Imprudence 1.4 and Kokua is a bit slow lately. For the most part, we’re taking care of other business while weighing our options for how to proceed with the media system. If you’ve never been involved in a project like this, you might not realize how much more work goes into it, even beyond just writing the code. But, we’re steadily chipping away at it, and we’ll keep you guys up to date.

Hi ho, Imprudence/Kokua fans! We’ve been gearing up again after our vacation, so it’s time for another status update.

First, though, I’d like to introduce a new team member, Boroondas Gupte. Boroondas has been working on the Kokua source since mid-November, but we’ve been so busy I forgot to announce it! Welcome, Boroondas!

Now then, the news on Imprudence. I wrote last month that we were going to try to release a 1.4 beta in mid-December. As it turns out, that was very wishful thinking on my part. We were so tired that we pretty much collapsed into full vacation mode right away!

The biggest thing left to do on 1.4 is getting a working plugin for streaming media and audio on Mac and Windows. As I wrote before, we were hoping to use a new VLC plugin created by Robin Cornelius. Unfortunately, Robin has been busy with holiday stuff, and now with her RL work. So, we’ll either need to try to pick up where she left off, or get the GStreamer plugin working with Mac and Windows, and save VLC for Kokua.

Speaking of Kokua, there has been some gradual progress on that. Over the break, Armin has been working on many parts of the code for fun, such as reimplementing colored client tags, song titles for music streams, preview animation uploads on your own avatar, private Point At and Look At targets, new minimap teleport code (including teleport-to-ground functionality), and the most important feature of all: purple clouds for unloaded avatars!

Armin has also done some UI work, including making the sidebar optional (although we still need to add alternative ways to access some of the features there), making the movement and camera control windows more similar to the old ones, and changing the main menu to the familiar File, Edit, View, etc. layout. In the future, we plan to offer a choice between this “classic” menu layout, and a new layout we’ll be creating later.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent some time revamping the build scripts to improve the way the viewer version is defined, and to make packaging the compiled viewer a fully automated process. Both of these improvements just reduce the amount of “chore” work for us, making our lives as developers a little bit easier, and letting us spend our energy on more interesting things.

I’m reluctant to make any predictions about when either Imprudence 1.4 or Kokua will be ready, since so much is uncertain. But, we are alive and working on them, and we’ll keep you guys in the loop. Thanks for your patience.